How I Send Polished HTML Emails From the Terminal (and Why I Left Google Workspace)

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I want to talk about something mundane that quietly became one of my favourite parts of my workflow: sending email.

Not newsletters. Not mass campaigns. Just regular one-to-one emails to clients and prospects — the kind that used to be plain text in a Gmail window, and are now polished, branded HTML documents that I compose in the terminal with Claude Code, review in a browser, and send with one click from Zoho Mail.

It sounds like overkill. It isn’t.

The Google Workspace Exit

I used Google Workspace for years. Most consultants and small businesses do. You get Gmail with your own domain, Google Docs, Drive, Meet — the whole suite. It works. It’s familiar.

Then I actually looked at what I was paying.

At $14/user/month for Business Starter (and rising), Google Workspace is priced for teams that genuinely use the whole suite. If you’re a solo consultant or a small team that’s already using Notion, Zoom, or other tools, you’re paying for a lot you don’t use.

I switched to Zoho Mail. For a single custom-domain email account, Zoho’s pricing is a fraction of what Google charges — and for my use case, the product is essentially equivalent. I get a proper inbox, a clean web interface, IMAP support, good spam filtering, and full control over my email address at my own domain.

The migration took an afternoon. I’ve never looked back.

The HTML Email Problem

One of the first things I noticed after leaving Google was that I’d been thinking about email wrong.

Gmail’s compose window is a rich-text editor. It feels like writing. But what it actually produces is inconsistently formatted HTML that looks fine in Gmail and sometimes terrible everywhere else. You have no real control over the output. You can’t enforce your brand colours, your font stack, your layout.

For internal communication, that’s fine. For a proposal you’re sending to a new client — the first real document they’ll receive from you — it’s not great.

The alternative is proper HTML email: you write the template once, you control every pixel, and every message you send carries a consistent, professional presence. Big companies have always done this. Small businesses mostly don’t, because writing HTML email templates by hand is tedious and the tooling has historically been developer-facing.

That changed for me when I started using Claude Code.

The Workflow

Here’s how it actually works.

I have a Python file — branded_email.py — that defines my email template. Dark background, my brand colours (deep purple and electric blue), my photo, my name and contact info in a consistent header, a clean footer. The CSS is all inline, which is what email clients require. It’s the kind of thing that would take a frontend developer half a day to build and maintain — but I wrote the first version with Claude Code in about twenty minutes, and I’ve refined it in small sessions since.

When I need to send a client email — a proposal, a project update, a follow-up with a quote — I open Claude Code and describe what I need:

“Draft a proposal email for a new client. They need a five-page website built in Astro. Project timeline is three weeks. Include a price callout block at $3,500 and a checklist of what’s included.”

Claude Code takes that, writes the email body in HTML using my template’s component system — section titles, callout blocks, price blocks, checklists — and saves it directly as a draft in Zoho Mail via my save_draft_branded() function. I don’t touch a text editor. I don’t open a browser. I don’t paste anything.

Then I open Zoho Mail, find the draft in my Drafts folder, review it, and if it looks right — send.

That’s the whole loop: describe → review → send.

Why the Review Step Matters

I want to be clear about something: Claude doesn’t send the email. I do.

The draft lands in Zoho and I look at it before it goes anywhere. I read it. I check the numbers. I make sure the tone is right for this particular client. Sometimes I edit a sentence. Occasionally I rewrite a section.

This isn’t a limitation — it’s the design. AI-assisted drafting is not the same as AI-controlled communication. These are emails to real clients, with real commitments attached. The review step is where I own what I’m sending. The AI handles the tedious part — structuring the HTML, filling in the boilerplate, keeping the formatting consistent. The judgment call is still mine.

That said: the draft is usually 80–90% of the way there. What used to take me thirty minutes to write, format, and second-guess now takes five.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The /branded-email command in Claude Code kicks off the full flow. I describe the email in plain language, Claude renders it through the template, and the draft appears in Zoho. From there:

A proposal email gets a price block, a checklist of deliverables, and a callout with next steps
A project update email gets a timeline table and a status callout
A follow-up email is usually just a few paragraphs — but still styled, still branded, still clearly from me

Every one of them looks like it came from a company that thinks carefully about its communication. Because it does — I just have a much faster path to get there.

The Broader Point

Small businesses tend to underinvest in the presentation layer of their communication. Proposals go out as plain text or Word documents with default fonts. Follow-up emails look like they were written on a phone. The content might be excellent, but the container undermines it.

AI doesn’t fix this automatically. But it does make the fix accessible.

You don’t need a design team or a marketing department to send professional HTML emails. You need a template, a workflow, and the right tools connected together. Once that plumbing is in place, the incremental cost of doing it right every time is close to zero.

If you’re paying Google Workspace prices and not using half the suite, that’s worth revisiting. And if you’re sending important emails in plain text when branded HTML would do — that’s worth fixing too.

Both are easier than they look.

Curious what this could look like for your business? Book a free call — I’m happy to walk through the setup.